New beauty shots of Jupiter, captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, reveal a speedy jet stream encircling the equator at an altitude never imaged before.
Researchers have known about Jovian jet streams since Voyager spacecraft flew by in 1979. Those relatively stable winds occur near the planet’s main cloud decks, in the troposphere. The newly spotted jet lies 20 to 40 kilometers above, in the stratosphere, and moves at about 500 kilometers per hour, or roughly twice as fast
Occasional flashes light up Venus’ shroud of clouds. Previous analyses have hinted that the bursts of light could be lightning in the hellish world’s atmosphere. But a new study suggests most of the flashes may be nothing more than the brief yet brilliant blazes of meteors.
With upcoming missions planned for Venus, scientists are eager to figure out the light’s origin (SN: 6/2/21). If the flashes are lightning, the electrical phenomenon could pose risks to future probes dropping
It will not quite be the ‘seven minutes of terror’ that spacecraft trying to land on Mars have to endure, but NASA’s Artemis I mission still faces a risky and anxious re-entry to Earth’s atmosphere when it returns on Sunday.
So far, the Orion capsule has had a successful journey to the moon and back during a 1.3 million mile voyage that has seen it fly the furthest any spacecraft designed to carry humans has ever travelled.
But now one
The Hope probe has three main objectives, the first is to understand the lower Martian atmosphere and its weather and climate. Yousuf continues, “The second objective is to correlate the lower atmosphere conditions with the upper atmosphere to explain how weather changes the escape of hydrogen and oxygen. And the final objective that we have is to understand the structure and variability of hydrogen and oxygen in the upper atmosphere and why Mars is losing them into space.”
The focus
